Utah State University Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 2004 Listening for a Life Listening for a Life Patricia Sawin Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Folklore Commons Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Sawin, P. (2004). Listening for a life: A dialogic ethnography of Bessie Eldreth through her songs and stories. Logan: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@usu.edu. Listening for a Life A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth through Her Songs and Stories Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page i Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page ii Listening for a Life A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth through Her Songs and Stories Patricia Sawin Utah State University Press Logan, Utah Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page iii Copyright © 2004 Utah State University Press All rights reserved Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-7800 Publication of this book was supported by a grant from the University Researcch Council at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sawin, Patricia. Listening for a life : a dialogic ethnography of Bessie Eldreth through her songs and stories / Patricia Sawin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87421-582-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Eldreth, Bessie Mae, 1913- 2. Eldreth, Bessie Mae, 1913—-Interviews. 3. Women folklorists— Appalachian Region—Biography. 4. Women storytellers—Appalachian Region—Biography. 5. Folk singers—Appalachian Region—Biography. 6. Folklore—Appalachian Region. 7. Folk music—Appalachian Region. 8. Appalachian Region—Social life and customs. I. Title. GR55.E53S397 2004 398’.092—dc22 2004004974 Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page iv For my parents, Marilynn and Lewis Sawin, whose lives and stories I cherish and whose loving listening I strive to emulate Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page v Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world. —William Butler Yeats, “Adam’s Curse” But is it impossible to reveal, through a character’s acts and through these acts alone, his ideological position and the ideological world at its heart, without rep- resenting his discourse? It cannot be done, because it is impossible to represent an alien ideological world adequately without first permitting it to sound, without having first revealed the special discourse peculiar to it. After all, a really adequate dis- course for portraying a world’s unique ideology can only be that world’s own discourse, although not that discourse in itself, but only in conjunction with the discourse of an author. —M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page vi Contents Preface ix Transcription Conventions xiii 1 Introduction Dialogism and Subjectivity 1 2 “That was before I ever left home” Complex Accounts of a Simple Childhood 28 3 “If you had to work as hard as I did, it would kill you” Work, Narrative, and Self-Definition 49 4 “I said, ‘Don’t you do it’” Tracing Development as an Empowered Speaker through Reported Speech in Narrative 68 5 “He never did say anything about my dreams that would worry me after that” Negotiating Gender and Power in Ghost Stories 98 6 “I’m a bad one to go pulling jokes on people” Practical Joking as a Problematic Vehicle for Oppositional Self-Definition 135 7 “My singing is my life” Repertoire and Performance 156 8 Epilogue 211 Notes 214 Works Cited 229 Index 241 Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page vii Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page viii ix Preface T his is a book about a woman both remarkable and ordinary. It is simultaneous- ly a book about the process, likewise both ordinary and remarkable, through which one person comes to know another. Bessie Eldreth and I first met in the summer of 1987, when she and her granddaughter, Jean Reid, were performing at the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife on the mall in Washington, D.C. Members of a group from Ashe and Watauga Counties in northwestern North Carolina, they had been invited to represent the distinctive culture and speechways of a portion of the mountain South to some wider American culture of which, the festival setting implied, they were a crucial part yet from which they were somehow separated. Several impressions from that first meeting intrigued me and attracted me to the possibility of working with Eldreth. She was framed for me as a “traditional singer” of some sort, although at that point I did not stop to ask what that might mean. Folklorist Glenn Hinson, who presented her on stage, mentioned that she sang constantly around the house, which hinted at a specifically gendered performance practice. Further, when I introduced myself to Eldreth she responded with a flood of stories about salient personal experiences. The accounts themselves were compelling, and she was clearly a woman who had a story she wanted to share. In the intervening years Eldreth and I have spent many hours talking at her kitchen table and tape- recording her stories and her repertoire of close to two hundred songs. I have gone back again and again not only to Eldreth’s house but also to those tapes, try- ing to grasp what our interactions meant and what she was trying to get across to me. Increasingly, I realized that I needed to challenge the presuppositions with which I had framed Eldreth and our interactions. She is a remarkable and dedi- cated singer, but her repertoire and practice link her more to the national, com- mercial spread of early country music than to the ancient solo ballad tradition in which I had imagined her participating. I had, furthermore, assumed that the significant difference between us was one of culture and that she was valuable for a folklorist to study because of her participation in a distinctive Appalachian cul- ture. However, I became more and more aware that, for Eldreth, the difference between us was an issue of class and specifically of the amount and kind of work we had had to do. I also gradually realized my error in supposing that I could Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page ix understand her communications about herself without taking account of my role as the person to whom she was speaking. The dialogic approach that I eventual- ly adopted recognizes that Eldreth, like all of us, talks and sings simultaneously to her immediate audience and to the ghosts of listeners past and future, both of whose understanding and response she anticipates. Once I learned to listen to Eldreth’s songs and stories as multivocal communications, I realized that she had been trying to teach me what revisionist historians and folklorists were arguing in these same years—that Appalachia was a rhetorical construct more than a separate region and that the area was as internally class divided as any other part of the country. What makes Eldreth remarkable, then, is not some status as a rep- resentative of Appalachian culture (an ascription she both resists and capitalizes upon strategically). Rather she is remarkable for her perseverance and self-sacri- fice, the work she did to support her children, her emotional survival despite minimal support from her husband. My goal is not, however, to paint her as flaw- less. In constructing a respectable self against the odds, Eldreth grasps at the resources available to her, which makes her complicit in reinforcing systems of racial and gender control upon which she relies. Over the years of working with Eldreth, I have grown (one might even say, grown up) as a person and a folk- lorist, learning above all that our disciplinary commitment to celebrate less- appreciated arts and artists need not blind us to the complexity of our subjects’ lives. It has been a challenge and an honor to get to know Bessie Eldreth. When I first asked Eldreth if I could come to North Carolina to talk with her and record her stories, she replied, “Child, you are as welcome as the water that runs.” She has borne my questions with grace and humor, always encouraging me to come visit, and has been very patient waiting for her book. I cannot fully repay her willingness to let me write about her, but every sentence of this book and every hour of the time I have spent working on it is an attempt to show my grat- itude. I have been fortunate in getting to meet all of Eldreth’s children and many of her grandchildren, and I appreciate their courtesy and tolerance of my involve- ment in their mother and grandmother’s life. For their friendship and humor I am especially grateful to Roger Eldreth, Carl and Libby Eldreth, Stacey and Drew Eldreth (aged three and five when this study began) and their parents, Bob and Wanda Eldreth, and Lorene Greene and her husband Buster Greene and son Michael Wheatley. Patsy Reese kindly lent the photograph of Eldreth as a child with her siblings and mother. It has been a blessing to worship with the members of the Tabernacle Baptist Church over the years. Thanks especially to Johnny and Helen Moretz and A. C. and Glenna Hollars for the insights our conversa- tions have given me into the changing life of church and community. Mary Greene made this project possible in innumerable ways. A musician, scholar, and longtime neighbor of Eldreth’s, Greene helped persuade me to embark on the work with Eldreth and was unfailingly generous in sharing her x Listening for a Life Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page x scholarly observations on mountain music and her personal reflections on grow- ing up in the area. She and her husband, Pat Baker, and their daughter Kathleen have kept me sane, challenged my assumptions, given me a place to sleep, fed me familiar food, and become cherished friends. I am grateful, too, to Greene’s late mother, Cleo Greene, who found a graceful way to explain me to the communi- ty. In Boone while I was doing my initial fieldwork, Elizabeth Stevens and Hattie the golden retriever were wonderful housemates. At Appalachian State University, Thomas McGowan provided support both practical and psychological for a fledgling scholar. Eric Olsen, former librarian of the Appalachian Collection at ASU, located earlier recordings of Eldreth, Reid, and Cratis Williams that proved extremely valuable. Along with McGowan, Cecilia Conway of ASU and Glenn Hinson, now my colleague at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have shared impressions from their work with Eldreth and encouraged mine. Conway and videographer Elva Bishop of UNC- TV persuaded me to collaborate on a video of Eldreth that helped me understand her rhetorical flexibility. For the dissertation with which this project began, I was fortunate in having committee members as supportive as they were demanding. Richard Bauman encouraged me to create my own path, branching off from theoretical roads he laid out. Beverly Stoeltje has been an influential advocate of feminist principles and a forthright and encouraging critic. Michael Herzfeld challenged me to be exact in my thinking. Kenneth Pimple, Laura Marcus, Polly Adema, Hanna Griff, and Mary Beth Stein thought through early stages of the project with me. David Whisnant supplied material and intellectual support essential to the dis- sertation. The book in important ways reflects my process of fully grasping insights about the construction of “Appalachian culture” that he was prescient in articulating. I gratefully acknowledge financial support for my fieldwork from the Indiana University Graduate School, the Berea College/Mellon Appalachian Studies Fellowship, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. A summer research award at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, and a junior faculty development grant and a faculty fellowship at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, pro- vided crucial time to write. I acknowledge the constructive feedback of my fel- low fellows at the IAH, especially Jane Thrallkill and Trudier Harris, and the generosity of David E. Pardue, Jr., and Rebecca Pardue, who endowed the fel- lowship I received. A grant from the University Research Council at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, made it possible to include color photographs. Carl Lindahl read my entire dissertation and helped me begin the process of rethinking this project for a book. Marcia Gaudet was a beloved mentor and big sister in my transformation from student to faculty member. Connie Herndon and Katherine Roberts have shared their reflections on Appalachia and how to Preface xi Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page xi go about studying a region we all love. Mary Bucholtz and Margaret Brady pro- vided encouragement that helped me believe there would be an audience for my work. Margaret Wiener and Yasmin Saikia read drafts of many chapters in a writ- ing group that made the process of creating this manuscript much more joyful. They, along with Judith Farquhar and Dorothy Holland, offered insightful cri- tiques that enabled me to see my focused project in light of larger trends and arguments. Marisol de la Cadena and Marc David gave me courage and knowl- edge to rethink the complexities of race. Louise Meintjes and Kathryn Burns engaged me in enlivening conversations that renewed my enthusiasm for the always shape-shifting project of cultural analysis. Leslie Rebecca Bloom has struggled along with me over the years to articulate a coherent feminist ethno- graphic practice; her intellectual and emotional sisterhood sustains me. Riki Saltzman has been my companion in folklore and my dear friend for more than twenty years; this project would never have come to fruition without her loving encouragement and inspiring example. Cathy Lynn Preston, Michael Preston, and James Lavita were instrumental in my choice of graduate study in folklore and have been fascinating interlocutors ever since. May they be pleased with what they have wrought. Anita Puckett introduced me to the new Appalachian historiography that crucially reoriented my understanding of Eldreth’s life. She, along with Amy Shuman and Elaine Lawless, read the entire manuscript and offered expert and exacting criticisms that have improved the work’s precision and grounding. It has been a pleasure to bring out the book with Utah State University Press. I am especially grateful to my editor, John Alley, for his patience, faith in my project, and clarity of vision. Rebecca Marsh’s graceful copy editing helped me make the prose flow. Kyle G. Sessions is responsible for the book’s interior design, and Barbara Yale-Read for the cover, which approximate Eldreth’s vision of a (rela- tively) “small, red book.” My parents, Marilynn and Lewis Sawin, instilled me with a love of learning and a fascination with the intricacies of artistic speech and have provided immeasurable encouragement as I pursued those issues in fields far from the lit- erature they taught. Their love, inspiration, questions, and occasional impa- tience have kept me going. Bron Skinner has blessed me with his presence in my life, his music, his joyfulness, and his enlivening mix of pragmatism and spiritu- al idealism. I thank him for encouraging me to have confidence in myself and to enjoy the creative process. xii Listening for a Life Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page xii xiii Transcription Conventions I n transcribing Eldreth’s stories and her conversations with me and other part- ners I have employed the following conventions to render oral communication into print. A period indicates falling intonation and brief pause (as at the end of a declar- ative sentence). ? A question mark indicates rising intonation (as at the end of an interrogative sentence), whether or not the phrase is a grammatical interrogative. [that] Brackets indicate words that the speaker did not actually say but that I have inserted to complete the sense or descriptions of accompanying nonverbal activity, such as laughter or hand motions. [plate?] Brackets with a question mark indicate a word or words that I cannot hear clear- ly on the tape. This is my best guess at making sense of what was said. . . . Ellipsis indicates a pause, especially within a sentence or phrase when the sense carries across the temporal disjuncture (for example, a pause as if searching for a name or particular word). [. . .] Bracketed ellipsis indicates an omission in my subsequent quotation of excerpts from a text. | A vertical line indicates an abrupt break in sense or syntactical flow, which may be, but usually is not, marked by a short pause, as when Eldreth repeats a word, corrects or amplifies a phrase before she has completed it, or changes the topic or her approach to it in midsentence. //oh// Double slash marks indicate simultaneous or overlapping speech of two partici- pants. but— A dash at the end of turn at talk indicates speaker breaking off because inter- rupted. (If the speaker takes up the same phrase after the interruption, the beginning of that turn at talk is marked with another dash.) bu— A dash following an incomplete word indicates a midword interruption. italics Italics indicate emphatic vocal stress. Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page xiii In representing pronunciation I strive to enable readers to hear the sound and rhythm of Eldreth’s voice, while being mindful to avoid stereotypical or negative representations of “Appalachian dialect.” In instances where Eldreth’s practice is consistent with broad patterns in informal American English—for example, the so-called dropped g at the end of progressive tenses or “till” rather than “until”—I simply employ standard spelling for all speakers. In instances where shortened forms have an impact on the flow of Eldreth’s speech, however, I have chosen to represent contractions such as “’em” (them), “’bout” (about), and “’cause” (because). I retain distinctive regional grammatical constructions, such as “a-walking” and “hit” for “it” in emphatic positions when Eldreth employs them, and have represented occasional distinctive pronunciations, like “young’uns” and “Papaw,” that would seem stilted or distorted if “corrected” toward some supposed standard. I similarly represent repetitions and false starts in Eldreth’s storytelling, both because I want to capture the effect of an informal oral narration and because disfluencies are occasionally significant. I have silent- ly excised listeners’ frequent minimal responses in order to speed and facilitate reading but have included listeners’ more explicit comments and questions where these are important to the sense of the passage or germane to the analysis offered. Since my analyses focus on the discourses and themes in the stories or on reported speech that is clearly demarcated and attributed to other speakers by Eldreth, I have presented the stories in paragraph form, using multiple para- graphs to indicate episodes or new phases (for example, the transition from expo- sition to evaluation) in longer accounts. xiv Listening for a Life Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page xiv 1 1 Introduction Dialogism and Subjectivity B essie Eldreth and I have been talking, on and off, for the past fifteen years. She, actually, does most of the talking and sometimes sings. I do most of the listening. We have that particular, but not entirely artificial relationship that emerges between ethnographer and subject. The topic of our conversation has been almost entirely Eldreth herself: her ninety years, her life in the North Carolina mountains, her specific experiences as a woman, her large repertoire of old songs, and her interactions with family, neighbors, and, over the past twenty-five years, with folklorists and the new audiences for singing and telling stories to whom they have introduced her. The exposure and opportunities to talk that have characterized Eldreth’s later life are an ironic inversion of her earlier experience. It is because she lived in a marginalized region and was often poor and depend- ent upon her own aesthetic resources that she is now celebrated as a “tradition- al Appalachian singer.” It is because she was for so long silenced by her husband and the restraints of an unabashedly patriarchal society that the stories she tells about her life intrigue me as a feminist. This book is my attempt to account as fully as possible for our conversations, to make sense of and make meaning from what transpired between us. In these conversations, Eldreth narrated a self, not simply describing an identity that fully preexisted our interaction, but speaking and singing herself into being, insofar as I am enabled to know her. Each individual story, like the overall self-narration to which it contributes, is constructed dialogically. Eldreth narrates herself in relation both to resilient social discourses that partially constrain definition of her gender, class, and region and to the anticipated responses of listeners past and present. While offering an account of Eldreth’s life, this book is not a biography or a life history. It is, rather, an ethnography of subject formation that under- stands the creation of a self as a recursive and dialogic process. Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page 1 The text thus unfolds at two levels simultaneously. At one level it functions as a portrait of Eldreth, derived primarily from her stories and songs and high- lighting those aspects of her life and portions of her repertoire that she has most wished to share. At another level, however, it is an account of how Eldreth con- stitutes herself as a subject by means of the various communicative resources available to her and of how I as ethnographer construct her as the subject of ethnography. We can come to understand Eldreth, I argue, not by treating her stories simply as transparent carriers of meaning but rather by analyzing how she creates an identity through communicative interaction and how I, as her imme- diate partner in conversation, am implicated in any account that comes out of our interactions. My approach thus challenges the assumptions that underpin biography or life history, in that biography treats the subject as self-evidently sig- nificant, life history presents the subject as representative of a group, and both not only accept the subject as preformed and self-consistent but also obscure the process whereby various bits of information drawn from multiple sources and originally inflected by multiple voices are melded into “the story” of a person’s life. The ethnography of subjectivity, in contrast, locates significance in expos- ing the process through which the subject creates her self through interaction and in interrogating the traces from which we can track that process. Eldreth is a fascinating individual with striking stories to tell and a distinctive repertoire of songs. She can, indeed, tell us both what it was like to raise eleven children on a rented farm in the southern mountains during the Depression and what it was like to present herself as a person who had had that experience to an audience at the Festival of American Folklife on the national mall in Washington, D.C. In another sense, however, the story I can tell about Eldreth is interesting precisely because it defies and deconstructs conventional defini- tions of significance and typicality. She is neither a major historical actor nor a “representative Appalachian woman.” She is a person doing what every person does, enacting a self. She can indeed provide information about the experience of a particular gender-class-region constellation, that of existing as a poor woman in that place that has been labeled Appalachia. If we think about her self- account in this light, however, we should recognize that our analysis runs count- er to Eldreth’s desire to stress her own uniqueness. At the same time, I acknowl- edge the irony that her particular version of the general process of self-creation came to my attention only because of the redressive attention that feminism and folklore pay to those who have been marginalized. The stories and songs, enactments and performances through which Eldreth creates herself are wonderfully evocative in their artistry and particularity. One purpose of this book is certainly to make those available to a wider audience and thereby to further Eldreth’s own project of laying claim to certain cherished iden- tities: virtuous though beleaguered wife, loving mother, hard worker, humorous prankster, talented singer. My reciprocal project is to analyze her means of thus constructing a self, with the goal of tracing her process of subject formation in 2 Listening for a Life Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page 2 detail—her resources and models, the discourses in which she positions herself, the pressures she feels and her ways of responding to them, the influence and lim- its of my role as listener. To achieve this goal, I approach ethnography as an inherently dialogic process, a responsive interaction between subject and ethno- grapher. While striving to create a text that serves Eldreth’s purposes as well as mine, I acknowledge that they are not identical and reject methodologies that mandate a coincidence and transparency that exceed and belie the nature of actual human communication. In the following pages I articulate a dialogic ethnography that enables me to find a secure and productive footing among the competing claims of multiple models of feminist and folkloristic ethnographic practice. A dialogic ethnography allays anxieties about the ethics of representa- tion, promoting the ethnographer’s joyful assumption of her inevitable interpre- tive responsibilities. This approach in turn enables me to see and to represent more accurately the complexities and contradictions in Eldreth’s character, which are of a kind that folklorists and feminist anthropologists—feeling bound to defend and celebrate their subjects—have rarely plumbed. Although over time she developed ways to resist or reject specific limitations placed on her because of her gender and class, Eldreth was never a conscious critic of the system that oppressed her. Consequently, she achieves positive self-ascription by indirect means and often at the cost of investing in positions that actually make her complicit in gender oppression or that take distressing advantage of racial privilege. Amid the current enthusiasm for studying social movements and activists who seek to understand and alleviate their own oppression, I focus on the much more common and prob- lematic practice of a person who achieves only partial, temporary, and compro- mised release from hegemonic forces. In so doing I respond to the challenge artic- ulated by José Limón, who critiques folklorists’ tendency to see the world of the socially marginalized in wholly positive terms (1994), and by Donald Brenneis, who urges us to acknowledge our attraction to the easy-to-tell, heroic stories of resistance and to document “practices of domination, accommodation, and com- plicity” as a step toward “illuminat[ing] the complexity and moral ambiguity of those events through which relations of power are constituted” (1993:300–301). A further clarification involves my abandonment of the notion that Eldreth could be considered an example of or participant in something we could call “Appalachian culture,” however attached folklorists may be to that concept. The attention paid to Eldreth by new audiences over the last twenty-five years has been mostly articulated in these terms. To the extent that this attention has been a welcome recompense after years of being taken for granted and has conferred some material advantages, Eldreth has acquiesced. She thus benefits, however, from membership in a club she never joined and to the existence of which she remains indifferent if not hostile. Although she is devoted to her mountains, her religion, and her music, she rejects attempts to treat her as an example of Appalachian culture. The salient difference between herself and those from Dialogism and Subjectivity 3 Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page 3 elsewhere, her self-accounts suggest, is one not of culture but of class, defined in terms of the kind and amount of work a person has to do. Her song repertoire bears witness to the region’s connection with a wider “American” society, although it also reveals her own devotion to an image of an isolated and pastoral Appalachia that depends on nostalgic repression of memories of such connec- tion. And while outsiders value her singing as a remnant of Appalachian cul- ture, she justifies it as a form of practical and spiritual women’s work. New audi- ences provide another resource for Eldreth’s self-construction, another object of which to make efficient use, but she defines her subjectivity in terms of gender and labor and defies us to impose the construct of a regional culture that does not correspond to her experience. Theory: Dialogism and Gendered Subjectivity The self, insofar as others perceive it and indeed to a considerable extent as we experience ourselves, is a product of social interaction (Mead 1934). There is no unified, essential identity, only a continual negotiation using terms that are themselves changed by that negotiation, a recursive but changeable enactment, a performance undertaken in the mode of belief (Bloom 1998; Butler 1990; Davies 1992; Walkerdine 1990; Weedon 1997). The subject authors herself by answering, producing herself through utterances that can exist only as responses to other utterances of other speakers, prior or anticipated (Holquist 1983). In order to engage in this interactive self-creation, one necessarily employs (and modifies) available models and resources—discourses, genres, ways of speaking, formulae, texts (and also, of course, nonverbal forms of enactment and commu- nication, although because of the nature of my relationship with Eldreth, I have access to these mostly through the verbal dimension). It is through the use, nonuse, modification, and innovation of these collective resources that what we recognize as culture in turn emerges and evolves. In her self-performance Eldreth employs certain relatively formalized genres—including ghost stories and songs from the British traditional and early country music repertoires—that are strong- ly associated with the region in which she lives. She also makes distinctive use of widely available resources such as the reporting of words spoken in previous interactions, the capacity of joking to articulate masked critique, and the per- suasive power of aesthetic performance. And she inevitably constructs a self rhetorically in relation not only to her current listeners but also to prior inter- locutors and to the discourses that are the sedimented and internalized forms of social attitudes expressed in the past. As a dialogic ethnography of subjectivity, this work focuses on the means whereby Eldreth interactively produces her self, with chapters exploring a variety of discourses and expressive resources. The por- trait of Eldreth, the account of what she presents herself as, emerges from the study of how she creates that self. 4 Listening for a Life Listening for a Life 5/27/04 2:23 PM Page 4